Sunday, June 24, 2012

I recently posted a recipe for Salmorejo Cordobés, a great cold soup we tried while in Spain.

Salmorejo Cordobés

After posting a photo of my first attempt at paella, I received a lot of requests for the recipe and I am keeping my promise to post the recipe here.

So, first I'll repost the photo I took of that first pan of paella as a teaser. If it looks good to you, believe me, it tasted as good as it looked. It is modeled after the paella we had at Ayo's Restaurant on the beach on the Costa del Sol. Here it is!

You can also use other meats such as mussels, white fish cut in chunks, good sausage, whatever looks good and is available in the marketplace. Also, while not absolutely necessary, a good paella pan is traditional in preparing this dish. They are available in many fine cooking stores.

Preparation:

In a large paella pan add olive oil and heat to brown chicken pieces. Remove chicken and add onions, garlic and chopped tomatoes. Cook unit very soft almost like a paste. Add the rice and stir until completed coated with sofito. Add saffron to hot chicken broth and add to rice in pan. Add chicken, and remaining fish to pan and let the liquid boil until the rice begins to open.

At this point you can let it continue to cook on top of range or you can put pan into a 300 degree oven and cook until rice is done approximate 25 minutes. Before putting into the oven or when rice is almost cooked you can add 6-10 clams. When ready to serve sprinkle peas, pimentos, and artichokes over the rice. Enjoy!

Sofito Preparation:

Use the amounts listed of the following items from the ingredient list above:

OnionGarlicTomatoessalt and pepper

Cook onions until opaque, add in garlic followed by the tomatoes. Cook until softened. Set aside. Make a day ahead if you like and refrigerate. Add salt and pepper to taste.

We flew into Toronto via Paris after our three week tour of Spain and Portugal. If you'd like to read about that trip, you can locate the blog installments of that adventure in the blog history along the right margin below.

Picked up our rental car at the airport and headed for the Toronto hotel we booked for the night. We'll get a fresh start tomorrow when we drive to Montreal. We'll spend a bit of time in Toronto at the end of this trip. We don't plan to spend a great deal of time here since we just weren't much inspired by anything we'd read about the city. Much more to see in our other planned destinations.

We'll be staying a couple of days in each of the Canadian cities of Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City as we drive east. Then we will dip down into Vermont, driving through the Lake Champlain islands, stopping at North Hero, on to Burlington, then a short ferry ride across Lake Champlain to the New York side where our journey will head west. Going to Vermont means my wife has been to all 50 states, so this is historic for her (I still have 4 more. It's a long story.)

Along the way we also plan stops in Cooperstown to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, drive along the Erie Canal to Rochester, New York and then stay a couple of days at Niagara Falls. We'll stay on the Canadian side since we have heard from several sources that it is much nicer.

Then our journey will come full circle when we return to,Toronto for our final day before flying to Vancouver, British Columbia, only 40 minutes from home for us. Our friends Mike and Donna will pick us up and take us to their home for dinner before driving us home to Bellingham.

So, stay tuned. There are plenty of adventures still to come.

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Day 1:

The first order of business was getting to our starting point which was an adventure in and of itself. We were coming in from Paris after an early morning flight from Madrid. We had just finished a three week tour of Spain and Portugal. Tired and ready for a change of scenery, we were very happy to be in Canada and the adventure in store.

We got out of the airport, into our Hertz rental car and arrived at our hotel room quickly and easily.

Hungry but preferably for something with lots of veggies, something we had way too little of in Europe, we found a local Kebab shop nearby. We ordered a chicken and a lamb kebab which were filled with fresh veggies. Delicious! We added a Greek salad to the order and managed to really sate our desire for those veggies.

Back in the room we organized ourselves for the next two weeks before heading off to bed. Heading for Ottawa in the morning.